Free Chapter of My New Book, Dog Treat Recipe Book and Customizable Pre-Travel Checklist

Filed Under Pet Sitting Business Tips, Pet Sitting Excellence | Leave a Comment

A big week for free treats! I officially launched my book “How to Create Excellence in Your Pet Sitting Business” yesterday - and you can download a free sample chapter and learn more about the book at :

How to Create Excellence In Your Pet Sitting Business Book Info

It’s also Professional Pet Sitters week and to celebrate my new Association of Pet Sitting Excellence is giving away two gifts that you can give your pet sitting clients - a Dog Treat Recipe Book and Customizable Pre-Travel check list. We even have some suggestions for you to let you know how you can use them to wow your clients.  Get them both here:

Celebrate Professional Pet Sitters Week Gifts

And finally - if you didn’t hear about my Pet Sitters Sharing Excellence Ebook - you can still download this special report that contains 100 tips from pet sitters for pet sitters.  Download a copy here:

Pet Sitters Sharing Excellence Ebook

If you have any trouble downloading any of these files just leave a comment and I’ll be happy to help you out.

Hope you have a great weekend - we are very busy with sits as it’s Spring Break next week here in Texas!

Danielle

 

Free Special Report - How to Setup Your Pet Sitting Blog

Filed Under Pet Sitting Business Tips, Pet Sitting Excellence | 1 Comment

It’s Freebie Friday so I’ve put together a short special report giving you tips on starting and writing your own pet sitting business blog.

 

The report tells you :

 

Why You Need A Pet Sitting Business Blog

How to Set-Up Up Your Blog and

How to Use Your Blog to Attract and Build Relationships with Customers

 

Here is the info that you’ll find inside:

 

What Is A Blog And How Do I Use It? 

Does Your Business Need a Blog?

7 Great Reasons to Set Up Your Own Pet Sitting Blog Today

How to Start a Blog

Why Owning Your Own Blog Is Important

Why WordPress Is a Great Blogging Option

How to Choose and Register Your Blog Domain Name

How to Get Hosting For Your Blog

How to Install WordPress

How to Easily Create Blog Content

How to Get More Tips to Improve Your New Blog

 

To download free special report click here:

 

How to Setup Your Pet Sitting Blog

During the remainder of this month I will be posting a series of new articles here at WorkingwithPets.com that explain how to:

  • Market your blog
  • Get traffic to you blog
  • Encourage your readers to post blog comments
  • Make your blog stand out
  • Automate your blog
  • Create an RSS feed
  • Build a loyal following of readers
  • Find ideas for blog content
  • Make money with your blog
  • Find guest bloggers

Our Circle of Excellence topic for March is “How to Setup Your Pet Sitting Blog”.  Become a member for just $9.95 per month to join me on our live call on March 16th    2010 to discuss how to setup and get your blog started. At the end of our call you will have the opportunity to get all of you questions about setting up and writing your blog answered.  If you can’t make it live to the call – all members will receive the recording and transcript of the call.

Find out the other benefits of membership (including over 12 months of call recordings, articles and special business building reports) at http://www.petbusinesssuccesscircle.com

 

How to Document Your Pet Sitting Systems with Process Flowcharts

Filed Under Pet Sitting Business Tips, Pet Sitting Excellence | Leave a Comment

Pet owners want to hire a pet sitter who will give quality, caring and consistent care for their pets while they are vacationing or at work, but just as importantly pet owners are also looking for convenience, which means that your pet sitting service needs to make it easy for them to:

  • find you
  • trust you
  • understand how the service works
  • hire you and schedule services
  • make payments

You can provide this ease by ensuring that you do a great job at marketing your business and have carefully planned operational business systems that are managed by a strong support team. 

Great marketing makes sure that:

  • potential clients can easily find your service
  • you build immediate trust by identifying your experience and credentials and by providing super customer testimonials

 Good operational systems make certain that:

  • your policies and pricing are obvious
  • communication with clients on your website, over the phone, or in person is consistent and clear
  • your business makes every effort to protect the health and safety of the pets in your car

To successfully grow a pet sitting business that creates an experience of pet sitting excellence the business must also be easy for you to run and manage. The more smoothly your day to day business runs, the more clients you will be able to connect with and provide excellent service, and the more pleasure and profits you will gain from your business. Operational systems make running your business more efficient and allow you to hand off tasks to a support team as your business grows.

If you have been pet sitting for a while then you have probably slipped into routines of how you perform different tasks.  How you answer the phone, conduct a client interview, perform a visit, and follow-up with clients. Do you have these routines written down or are they all in your head?

 To create a system you must put your routines down on paper in an organized format. A system lays out the steps it takes to accomplish any task – whether that task is accepting a customer booking, completing an initial client interview, or performing an in home overnight visit. The best way to document your systems is to create flowcharts that show the steps involved in each task and how they link together.

Getting routines written down on paper can help you to see opportunities to improve the way you do things and make regularly performed tasks more efficient.  When you start growing and need to get help from assistants or sitters having a written set of steps will save you time when you assign them tasks and make sure they perform the tasks the way that you want them done.

Another way to look at a system is to describe it as a step by step path to achieving a desired outcome.  The completion of each of the tasks that you listed as part of your daily logs will result in an outcome for your business.

A simple method for creating systems is to ask yourself two questions:

  • Where are we going?  What is the desired outcome upon completion of each of these tasks?
  • How do we get there? What are the steps that have to happen to reach the desired outcome?

Let’s look at an example -

Task - Answering a new phone client enquiry

Outcome - The first desired outcome is that the client schedules an initial interview and makes a booking for future pet sitting visits.  A second outcome is collecting the client’s contact details - phone number and email address - so that you can keep in touch with them and follow up.  This means that even if they call and cancel (the neighbor has decided they can watch the pets this time!) that you will have their contact details and can send them coupons or flyers to entice them to use your service in the future.  A third outcome of the call may be to find out where they heard about you so that you can track the effectiveness of your marketing.

System - The steps that you have to go through to get them to book will vary depending on the client but you will always have to:

  • Greet the client.
  • Ask them about their needs and their pets and when they will need your services
  • Explain the features and benefits of your service and your pricing
  • Ask them when they would like to schedule their initial interview or consultation
  • Ask them for their address, phone number and an email address (so that you can send them welcome information)
  • Ask them how they found your service

This is a simplified step by step process for the initial call - in reality on a system flowchart the next step on the call would depend on their response you have received from the previous step. However, I hope this example has illustrated how the steps in your process flow from your desired outcome for the task.   

One of the simplest ways to document your step by step processes is on a flow chart.  You can open an example flow chart for our initial call system by clicking on the link below:

Click to Open Pet Sitting Process Flow Chart

If you have an existing pet sitting business the first step you should take is to document your as-is processes so that you can delegate some of your daily tasks to your support team and analyze your processes to see where there is room for improvement.

If you are just starting your business you can document your processes as you would like them to be.  This will help you purposefully create your new business and help you think and plan out how your services will be delivered and managed.

To help you document your business processes all Gold members of the new Association of Pet Sitting Excellence will receive a process flow chart template and new mini-process flowchart every month that you can add to your systems library.  For details about membership and pre-launch give aways become a fan of the APSE at http://www.facebook.com/PetSittingExcellence

 

 

Do You Have A Pet Sitting Business Plan?

Filed Under Pet Sitting Business Tips, Pet Sitting Excellence | Leave a Comment

To create a great pet sitting business you should dedicate time to create a well thought out business plan. The purposes of a business plan are to:

1.Define your vision of what you want your pet sitting business to look like in 5 to 10 years from today

2.Lay out the direction of your business and give you a path to follow.

3.Establish standards that you can use to measure your business success

Your plan should define how you want to operate your pet sitting business and include a description of your support team, your marketing strategy, and the methods that you will use to interact with your customers.

A business plan may be:

1.A formal document that you use to raise capital to finance your company

2.An informal document that is used internally by you and your support staff that helps you to plan out your strategies to make sure that your pet sitting business is successful

You plan should be a work-in-progress and a document that you continually update as you business grows. The strategies within this book will help you to prepare a business plan for your business, or to update your existing business plan.

You can find additional instructions and formal business plan templates at the US Small Business Administration website:

http://www.sba.gov/smallbusinessplanner/plan/writeabusinessplan/

If you need a simple plan for your internal use my One Page Pet Business Plan Toolkit leads you though the steps to create your plan and provides examples from my own pet sitting business plan. It also includes a one page business plan template. You can get your free copy when you join the Circle of Pet Sitting Excellence for just $9.95 per month (the One Page Pet Business Plan usually sells for $10 by itself on the resources page of Working with Pets - so this is a great deal!).  You can cancel your monthly payment subscription at any time with no hassles.

Why Is Pet Sitting Excellence Important?

Filed Under Pet Sitting Excellence | Leave a Comment

Back again with another sneak peek at my new book -  “How to Create Excellence in Your Pet Sitting Business”.  Today I want to explain why I think that pet sitting excellence is so important to your business and to the pet loving world!  If you’ve missed the other two parts you can catch up and read them  here: 

What is Pet Sitting Excellence?

The Characteristics of Pet Sitting Excellence

Why is Pet Sitting Excellence Important

In our culture pets are fast becoming more than just companion animals. They are now valuable members of the family. As such the role of the pet sitter takes on even greater responsibility. 

As a pet sitter you are the temporary custodian of your client’s pets. It is your job to protect their health, safety, and emotional wellbeing while the pet’s owners cannot be there to do this important job. It is vitally important that your pet sitting business is set up so that you have systems in place that both guarantee the pets wellbeing as well as take care of your client’s emotional needs by making them feel safe leaving the pets in your care.

In the past two years the pet sitting industry has seen an average of 7% annual growth. This means that the number of pet sitting services available to pet owners in your area is expanding and to make sure that your business continues to attract new clients you must become more competitive by offering superior services. Creating a business designed to embody pet sitting excellence allow you to build a reputation as the pet sitting services leader in your area.

The improved customer satisfaction will ensure that your business receives more repeat business, generates more word of mouth referrals, and creates automatic client buzz and community publicity and recognition.  It will also allow you to collect sparkling testimonials from your clients that then work to help you build trust and market your business to new clients.

I plan to launch the book on March 15th - so stay tuned and I’ll have some more sneak peeks for you soon!

In the meantime don’t forget to join in the Pet Sitters Sharing Excellence project by sharing your business tips - here is all the info:

Share Your Pet Sitting Tips and I’ll Give You My Special Twitter Marketing Secrets Report

If you don’t use Twitter my free report will show you all the basics - and they you can tweet with me and otehr pet sitters.

keep looking »